who am I?
I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego (see lab page at vislearnlab.org).
My work focuses on how we learn to derive meaning from what we see. Because when we open our eyes, we don’t see “a blooming, buzzing confusion:” we see tables, chairs, computers, books, and cups. My research aims to understand the nature and development of these visual concepts, asking: How do we learn to connect what we see with what we know? How do we form new visual concepts and how do they change across development? To make progress on these questions, I combine primarily behavioral and computational methods in infants, children, and adults. I take an ecological approach throughout my work, e.g., analyzing what infants see in their everyday lives, quantifying changes in children's drawings of categories, and studying how our representations of objects are shaped by our physical interactions with them. For more, check out my research page or my publications.
I'm supported by an NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award. I completed my Ph.D. in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where I worked with George Alvarez, Talia Konkle, and Susan Carey in both the Harvard Vision Lab and the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. I earned my M.S. from the Cogmaster program at École Normale Supérieure in Paris working with Sid Kouider and Emmanuel Dupoux at LSCP, funded by a Fulbright Advanced Student award. As an undergraduate, I worked with Caitlin Fausey and Lera Boroditsky for my Honors Thesis in Human Biology at Stanford University (see full CV).
